Devotees of late Monet can rejoice. The Museum of Modern Art is putting all three of his beloved waterlily paintings on view for the first time since 2001, along with a relatively recent acquisition and two guests.
Beginning Sunday, you can immerse your senses in “Water Lilies,” the triptych with the 40-foot-plus wing span, and “Water Lilies,” the wide-angle, single-panel mural. On one wall the triptych rumbles forth its rich panoply of blues, greens, lavenders, creams and pinks, like a full-bodied symphony. Opposite, the lone panel responds, a glissando of violins, with a pale, silvered reiteration of the same palette shimmering into silence.
Both were worked on, again and again, with many others, during the last dozen years of Monet’s long life, when the final phase of his innovative Impressionistic style opened the path to abstract painting after World War II. At his death in 1926, at 86, they remained in his studios at Giverny, France, near his elaborate aquatic gardens, their radical nature perplexing and even repulsing some of his most dedicated admirers.
Were they unfinished? Did the frequent lack of signature signify a final ambivalence about their worthiness? Did their blurry, edgeless forms and sometimes clumsy paint handling simply reflect Monet’s eye problems?
Hardly. Over his last years Monet had assiduously negotiated an agreement with the French state to accept a large group of them as a gift to the nation, to be displayed in specially constructed galleries (with curved walls) in the Orangerie in Paris. The main liaison in this transaction was his dear friend Georges Clemenceau, prime minister of France, 1906-9 and 1917-20.
In the Modern’s show the two big paintings are exhibited with the two other more manageable, easel-size late Monets from the collection. The fierce “Japanese Footbridge” from around 1920-22 is startling: its fiery oranges, browns and deep greens seem conversant with van Gogh, late Bonnard, Ensor and even Soutine. “Agapanthus,” 1914-26, meanwhile, moves to dry land and a grassy green Art Nouveau swirl of the leaves and tiny, clustered mauve blooms of this plant, also known as the Lily of the Nile.
“Agapanthus,” which entered the museum’s collection in 1992, measures around 6 ½ by 6 feet. It is nonetheless a study, probably painted from life and then taken back to the studio to help in the execution of larger works that were in many ways less finished and descriptive.
This was also probably the case with two slightly smaller canvases on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Both are bluntly painted close-ups of waterlilies, quickly dashed off patches of the vistas of the larger paintings, with a nocturnal mien. Their unembellished urgency conveys Monet’s obsession with his subject in unusually direct terms.
In front of nearly all the paintings here, and the triptych especially, the eye hovers and zooms over the surface like a dragonfly, exploring its horizontal recessions and watery depths, its intimations of reflection and mist and lily pad. Paralleling this experience is the consciousness of artifice and method: the incessant signs of Monet’s hand. His brushwork is modest, notional, almost scriptlike. As with our dragon-fly gaze, it too skips across the surface — and skips and skips and skips again. Paint is applied in quick thatches of short lines of every orientation and every shade of blue; in trails of horizontal ellipses (the pads) that move from turquoise to bright green to dark green as they progress across the canvas, in and out of the shade; and in soft, cloudy pileups of mostly white figure eights (mist). It is all about accumulation: the layering of color, the build-up of texture.
As in the old days before the museum’s most recent renovation, the waterlily paintings are sequestered in their own gallery some distance from the onward march of modernism according to MoMA. This always felt right: isolation emphasizes the meditative, immersive quality of these works, which are really a world unto themselves.
In addition these paintings are too adamantly ahead of their time to fit quietly into any linear chronology. After the Modern reopened in 2004, it was actually a bit jarring to encounter the triptych in a room between galleries devoted to Russian Constructivism and Mondrian’s crisp scaffoldings of line and color, even though the works dated from the same period.
Even today, as revered and familiar as they are, the basic data of the biggest canvases can be difficult to compute. They were made in the first quarter of the 20th century by an octogenarian who had already played a central role in one of Western painting’s great revolutions 50 years earlier. And well past the second quarter of the 20th century these paintings were still challenging contemporary artists. Put another way, as Monet was setting up for this last project — using quite a bit of his wealth and the services of six gardeners to get his garden up to speed — Cubism, Constructivism and Futurism were just beginning to reverberate across the globe. And yet here he was, working on a scale and in a manner that postwar advocates of Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists would come to call “all-over painting,” “action painting” and “American-type painting.”
Yet nothing had really changed. Monet was simply following his early work to its logical conclusion, giving little or no thought to abstraction. Right to the end he remained engrossed in the challenge of looking and painting, painting and looking, never wavering in his dedication to the task of translating his perception of the visible world into oil on canvas, bringing the natural and the artificial into hand-wrought balance. Perhaps he knew that painting, like poetry or music, was one of the few human endeavors that stood any chance of equaling some of nature’s experiential richness, if you just kept at it long enough.
This exhibition has been organized by Ann Temkin, curator of painting and sculpture. It is in many ways a model of its kind: a small, tightly-focused, collection-based display that more museums should do and that many, in these lean times, probably will be doing more often. It is accompanied by a slim booklet with an essay by Ms. Temkin that encapsulates Monet’s career and zeroes in on the late paintings and their importance in accessible layman’s terms. Ms. Temkin does not push the envelope of the accepted view of these works as postwar painting’s precursors. No mention is made, for example, of the importance of Japanese screens on Monet’s sense of scale, frontality and infinite space extending far beyond the canvases’ edges.
But her essay has a refreshing openness. It charts the growing admiration of Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum’s founding director, for late Monet, and quotes his carefully worded letters to trustees who might pay for them. And it provides fascinating details. Regarding the growing stature of Monet’s late works in the 1950s, to which the Modern’s attention contributed: The museum bought its first large waterlily painting — at 18 feet across, the widest painting to enter the collection up to that point — in 1955, for the equivalent of $11,500. A mere three years later it paid the equivalent of $150,000 for the triptych, acquiring it as a replacement for the first work, which was destroyed in a fire at the museum.
Arriving at the museum in poor condition, the triptych was extensively restored and put on new stretchers. Dorothy Miller, one of the museum’s early curators, gave Monet’s original stretchers to three young New York painters: Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman and Fred Mitchell. Those were the days.
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